"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The end of the world, sideways, sort of

As
I understand it, the world will come to an end next week. This bit of not very good
news
comes to us courtesy of the ancient Maya, whose calendrical wisdom was such
that even people pretending to be relatively sane, like Keynesian economists
and life insurance salesmen, will bow their heads reverently in profound deference whenever the subject of calendrical eschatology comes up in polite conversation. The
end of the world as we know it carries with it no end of special duties and
burdens, like spending more time with your family, comforting those distressed
by this somewhat unexpected turn of events, going to church and confessing
one’s sins or not going to church and committing fresh sins while you still
have time to commit them, and paying your income taxes. No, this is not a joke. I am sure that the IRS will want you to know
that, end of the world or not, you will still have to pay your income taxes for
the 2012 tax year. Therefore, given the tentative nature of human existence
post-December 21st, you should file your Form 4868 for an automatic
extension of your filing date as soon as possible. Apocalypses and extinction
events are all very well and good, you see, but no one gets out of here alive
or without paying what they owe to the government.There’s just no way that’s going to happen.

Now,
I know that the Maya, ancient and otherwise, are a Third World—Native
American—First Nations—collective indigenous noun of your choice people, and as such are
filled with virtues, insights, and traditional knowledge permanently denied to vile,
decadent, and materialist Euro—American schnooks like me, so I know I shouldn’t
question the wisdom of the Maya elders when they foretell the end of the Earth
in only a few short days, but I have a question and apparently no one has the
answer: if the ancient Mayans were so attuned to the ways of the universe that
they could predict when the world was going to end several hundred years in the
future, how come they couldn’t predict when the Spanish were going to show up
and put an end to their world in the 1500’s?

I
mean, really, you and all your people are one with time, the universe, and
everything, and you miss something like a large number of illegal immigrants about to show up on your doorstep intent on committing mayhem?How do you miss a megahumongous
load of bad karma like that? This was an apocalyptic event for the Maya--it would be a apocalyptic event for anyone--and no soothsayer worth his salt saw it coming? Was the psychic radar screen in need of adjustment that
week? If you ask me, and I know you didn’t but I don’t care, the arrival of the
conquistadores was the sort of thing you’d think a very good prophet would have
picked up on, especially when the prophet—king—soothsayer did his
predicting under the influence of psychedelic drugs while tugging a bit of
homemade barbed wire through his genitalia, a feat that hurts just thinking
about it. I know I would have predicted all sorts of things if someone were
dragging a rope with imbedded stingray spines through my private parts; in
fact, I would have predicted anything anyone wanted me to predict in order to
get the fish parts out of my parts. The Spanish came intent on kicking ass in a truly gynormous way. And remember, in
those days it took months to get from Seville to Mesoamerica. Months, people, months, months of negative energy and an occasional bout of the dreaded scurvy were building up in Andalusia and then heading out over the Atlantic intent on doing vile and nasty things to the Maya. The entire point of the exercise from day one was
to get some ass—the mestizos didn’t come from nowhere, folks—kick other people’s
ass, and grab as much gold as they could carry before going home and lording it
over the peons for the rest of their lives. This is not something the Maya
could have learned by checking the airline passenger manifests for
known troublemakers.And it’s not like
the conquistadors booked a weekend trip to Cancun and then decided to stay on
for a few extra weeks to take advantage of the duty—free looting, pillaging,
and forcible converting to Catholicism deals offered by Iberia Airlines. The Spanish
came to the Americas packing large amounts of heat and with loads of malice aforethought on
their minds. Something like that didn’t send a major league tsunami through the
Maya equivalent of The Force? Am I really supposed to believe that?

Yes, I am and no, it didn’t;
the Spanish showed up the same way my Uncle Max used to, unwanted and
unexpected, sort of like the flu, except with a better wardrobe, and none of
the Maya knew that the Spanish were coming, or if they did, they did nothing
about it. They didn't even put out a sign saying, Welcome to France, in order to confuse the conquistadors. That strikes me as being very odd, no two ways about it, so I hope
you’ll please pardon me if I think that the Mayan prediction that the world is
going to end next Friday is a load of toads’ gonads. Their track record to date
doesn’t seem very reliable, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. I still have my
money on a nuclear war with the Iranians or the North Koreans causing the apocalypse. I know that that’s
betting the chalk, but I still think that the odds are better.